Friday, June 08, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 50
I suspect that writing is changing and I
don’t mean the usual changes that occur over time such as the treatment of
taboo subjects or social observation or Joycean playfulness with words. The
coming generations will not be wedded to the printed word or screen-based text
in quite the way I was for most of my life. Their world is technologically
different, they carry communication to the entire world in their pockets, they
are receivers of visual stimuli constantly, they are interactive…
I remember running a research project many
years ago (the book of the project is advertised on www.chronometerpublications.me)
which was one of the earliest forays into the experience of children with video
games and computers. Already there was the generational rift between the child
and the luddite parent which these days is exacerbated by computer-based social
media like Facebook and Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Friends Reunited. At the
bottom end of the generational ladder users’ speed at managing the world of
apps, fast tracks them beyond the ossifying brains of their elders. Now I am
not up to date with any of it but I would still surmise that the plastic brain
we all have (more amenable to learning the younger we are) is forming new ways
of seeing and interpreting the world, influenced and even conditioned by these
new technologies. Questions we dealt with on the British Board of Film
Classification’s Children’s Advisory panel are even more relevant. Are people
more likely to commit anti-social acts if they play video games constantly? Are
the young finding it more difficult to distinguish the virtual from the real?
Has everything got to be sound-byte size? What technology will be in our
pockets or chip implanted brains in ten years?
For a long time a rattling good tale will
still carry sway over readers BUT getting them to the book in the first place
is the question. Even an e-book. Somehow we may need to be more innovative in
our very presentation, syntax and lexicons to draw them in and appease their
critical disinterest in the word. We may have to package how we write as well
as what we write to fit the smart phone user. Some time ago Umberto Ecco made
the point that people read in paragraphs now, hardly bothering to step heavily
from sentence to sentence. Long books (Alas poor Azimuth!) may be too far off the radar of the young. They may need
to be presented like a Dickens novel, in serial byte form though, I believe,
various attempts to do this have met with mixed success. As writers we are in
competition with so many media, vying for windows in the technological time of
our customers.
Whilst I, as a novelist, try to be
innovative, I can no longer stay at the bow wave of innovation (if I ever
could!). All I can do is write more visually, borrow tricks from mould-breaking
films and seek plotlines to illuminate the existential dilemmas that face oncoming
generations as they grapple with human identity in a universe which conflates
flesh and blood with pixilated other realities.
www.chronomterpublications.me
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